ACGME faculty scholarly activity requirements

What the requirements say

ACGME’s Common Program Requirements (Residency), effective July 1, 2026, set the rule in sections 4.13, 4.14 and 4.14.a. The Fellowship version lists the same seven domains.

Section 4.13 reads: “The program must demonstrate evidence of scholarly activities consistent with its mission(s) and aims”. Section 4.14, Faculty Scholarly Activity, asks programs to “demonstrate accomplishments in at least three of the following domains”:

• Research in basic science, education, translational science, patient care, or population health
• Peer-reviewed grants
• Quality improvement and/or patient safety initiatives
• Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, review articles, chapters in medical textbooks, or case reports
• Creation of curricula, evaluation tools, didactic educational activities, or electronic educational materials
• Contribution to professional committees, educational organizations, or editorial boards
• Innovations in education

Section 4.14.a reads: “The program must demonstrate dissemination of scholarly activity within and external to the program by the following methods”. It names two:

• “faculty participation in grand rounds, posters, workshops, quality improvement presentations, podium presentations, grant leadership, non-peer-reviewed print/electronic resources, articles or publications, book chapters, textbooks, webinars, service on professional committees, or serving as a journal reviewer, journal editorial board member, or editor”
• “peer-reviewed publication”

Each specialty’s Review Committee chooses whether its programs need the first method or both. ACGME publishes every Review Committee’s choice in one table.

The Background and Intent under 4.14.a says how the Review Committee reads the record. It “will evaluate the dissemination of scholarship for the program as a whole, not for individual faculty members, for a five-year interval, for both core and non-core faculty members”.

What programs report in ADS

ACGME removed the Faculty Scholarly Activity section of the ADS Annual Update for all accredited programs, effective July 1, 2025. In its place, accredited programs answer two questions about the program’s faculty scholarly activity as a whole. ACGME says it heard that reporting detailed data for each faculty member “added significant burden to programs”.

ACGME’s FAQ encourages programs to answer “from the perspective of scholarly activity for their entire faculty group over the past academic year”. It adds that faculty scholarly activity “continues to be an important ACGME requirement”.

New program applications still complete faculty scholarly activity data entry, and they do not answer the two questions. Earlier years’ faculty scholarly activity stays in ADS as a report to download. Each academic year, programs also review and update their Faculty Roster. ACGME lists no major changes to the program Annual Update for 2026 to 2027.

The yearly faculty evaluation

The program evaluates each faculty member at least once a year. Section 5.4 reads: “The program must have a process to evaluate each faculty member’s performance as it relates to the educational program at least annually”. Section 5.4.a includes the faculty member’s “scholarly activities” in that evaluation. Section 5.4.c reads: “Faculty members must receive feedback on their evaluations at least annually”.

Each year, the program reviews scholarship twice: person by person in the section 5.4 evaluation, and for the whole faculty in the two ADS questions.

How the ACGME summary in ScienceDex works

Each faculty member has a summary of their own, and the program runs the same summary for all its faculty. Its seven measures count kinds of work, person by person. The two ADS questions ask which domains and dissemination methods the faculty showed as a whole.

For each faculty member

1. 1

   Pick the academic year. Choose a year, July to June, and ScienceDex reads your CV for that year.

2. 2

   Read each measure. The measures are PMIDs, conference presentations, other presentations, chapters or textbooks, grants with a leadership role, leadership or peer-review role, and teaching formal courses. Each gives your answer and the entries behind it.

3. 3

   Check how each is counted. A paper or a presentation counts in the academic year its date falls in. A date with only a year counts in the academic year that ends in that year. To place it exactly, add the month. A role, a grant or a course counts when its dates overlap the year.

4. 4

   Copy the row or download a CSV. Copy row gives PMIDs 1 to 4 and the answers to the other six measures, separated by tabs. The CSV holds the answers, then every entry counted.

For the program

• The Reports tab runs the ACGME scholarly activity summary for all faculty. It gives one row per person and academic year, July to June, by the rules of each faculty member’s own summary.
• Its columns are the seven measures, and its PMID list holds every PMID of the year. Run it for the last academic year or over several, and download Excel or CSV.
• Each person in the report sees the download in their activity log.

In each faculty member’s own summary, every count lists the entries behind it. Faculty can check each count before they send it to their program.

Faculty privacy sets out what departments see, what they never see, and the log of each time someone opens a CV.